Deleting string rewriting systems preserve regularity

Abstract

A string rewriting system is called deleting if there exists a partial ordering on its alphabet such that each letter in the right-hand side of a rule is less than some letter in the corresponding left-hand side. We show that the rewrite relation induced by a deleting system can be represented as the composition of a finite substitution (into an extended alphabet), a rewrite relation of an inverse context-free system (over the extended alphabet), and a restriction (to the original alphabet). Here, a system is called inverse context-free if the length of the right-hand side of any rule does not exceed one. The decomposition result directly implies that deleting systems preserve regularity, and that inverse deleting systems preserve context-freeness. The latter result was already obtained by Hibbard (J. ACM 21(3) (1974) 446–453).